Yves here. Since even news outlets overseas have been overweight on Biden and now Trump coverage, it seems more important than ever not to neglect other major stories. But I have to confess to finding this one on Gaza, Starmer, and Labour to be odd, starting with the first word in the title, “devastation”. Why the apparently perceived need to avoid using words that clearly point to the loss of life and horrific human rights violations, like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”?
UK-knowledgeable readers please feel free to correct me, but it seems hard to see how Starmer not opposing Israel’s policies is much of an impediment for Labour. As far as I can tell, voters in the UK who oppose Israel’s bloody campaign against Palestinians have no where to go. Labour, the Conservatives, and the insurgent Reform Party are all firmly pro-Israel. The Lib Dems, who did gain in this election, have some MPs who have criticized Israel. However, they were reprimanded by party leaders. George Galloway’s Workers Party was soundly hostile to Zionism, but Galloway lost his seat and none of the party candidates won. That failure is arguably due to Sunak calling the elections on the early side in part (if not significantly) to thwart the new and barely organized party. But will it have any gas at the next Parliamentary contest?
Perhaps I am wrong for seeing UK voters as having no where to do on Israel and therefore Starmer’s support for Israel’s horrific conduct as having low to no practical cost. If so, it would be very helpful to find out why.
By Paul Rogers, Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies in the Department of Peace Studies and International Relations at Bradford University, and an Honorary Fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College. He is openDemocracy’s international security correspondent. He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers. Originally published at openDemocracy
The Labour Party’s landslide general election victory on 4 July has been compared to the party’s previous wins under Tony Blair in 1997 and Clement Atlee in 1945. But Keir Starmer won a far smaller vote share than either Blair or Attlee and, unlike in 1997 and 1945, the mood of the victors was hardly euphoric – more damp squib than firework display.
The party’s win was not down to any widespread love of Starmer’s policies, but a deeply embedded antagonism to the 14 years of the Tory rule, aided by Nigel Farage’s Reform Party taking votes from the Conservatives, the collapse of the SNP vote in Scotland and an unusually low national turnout.
Labour was further held back by an unexpectedly large number of voters who abandoned the party – many of whom were motivated by its stance on Israel’s assault on Gaza. The mainstream media has wrongly attributed this to the UK’s substantial Muslim minority, portraying it as just a sectarian issue – ignoring the anger and hurt felt by many on the left.
Independent candidates stood primarily on a pro-Gaza ticket across many parts of the north of England, the Midlands and London. Five were elected – a record for a general election – and many more came close, most notably Leanne Mohamad in Ilford North, who managed to reduce new health secretary Wes Streeting’s majority from 5,218 to just 528.
Overall, in 57 constituencies, Labour’s biggest challenger was an independent or a candidate from the Green Party or the Workers Party. The Greens’ leap forward was particularly notable – they came in second place in 40 seats, all currently held by Labour, up from three in 2019.
As the new independent candidates said repeatedly throughout the election campaign, Gaza is just one reason for dissent from the new Starmer norm. Many traditional Labour supporters are also unhappy that the party is moving decidedly rightwards and embracing Big Business, as revealed last week by openDemocracy. Labour now seems likely to end up as a centre-right party – effectively disenfranchising several million people.
Even so, Labour’s position on Gaza was undeniably a big factor in its fall in majorities in many seats. It presents a problem for Labour in general and Starmer in particular that is simply not going to go away – and has several components.
The first is that Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his far-right Knesset supporters have long espoused the view that defeating Hamas in Gaza requires inflicting punishment on the whole civilian population. It is this so-called Dahiya doctrine that is largely responsible for the appalling loss of life among Palestinians.
The death toll in Gaza is at least 37,000, with as many as 10,000 missing, mostly buried under the rubble, and well over 70,000 wounded. The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal, recently published a letter that suggested that if indirect deaths – including those due to disease, malnutrition and increased infant mortality – are included then the total number of human lives lost could reach 186,000.
The second is that there is no end in sight for the current war. There are occasions when talks seem to be getting underway but they repeatedly come to nothing, as they have done for the past six months at least. The Palestinian suffering is huge but the Hamas military leadership believes it can persevere, especially as claims by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) that most of Gaza has been cleared of Hamas turn out to be false.
Israel’s current leadership has little interest in a long-term ceasefire. Netanyahu will certainly persist with his attack on Gaza until at least the US presidential election in November, now hoping that Donald Trump surviving the recent shooting will help to secure his win. Meanwhile, Israel’s steady encroachment on Palestinian land and people in the West Bank is a further sign of a long-term insistence on permanent control “from the river to the sea”.
Finally, there is one more factor that is rarely understood. The sheer scale of the loss of life and wider Palestinian suffering due to the Israeli assault on Gaza has already caused a long-term – perhaps permanent – shift in attitudes towards Israel and support for Gaza in the UK, which reaches far beyond Muslim communities.
This shift will likely only increase as more and more evidence emerges about the Israeli conduct of the war. Last week the highly experienced foreign correspondent, Chris McGreal, published a report on the IDF’s repeated use of fragmentation artillery shells in densely populated urban areas. Perhaps the most devastating of all such ordnance being used is the Israeli M339 tank shell, whose manufacturer, Elbit Systems, describes it as “highly lethal against dismounted infantry”. No doubt even more so against children.
The deliberate human impact, especially on children, is appalling and causes injuries that would be difficult to treat even in well-equipped and fully functioning hospitals – of which there are none left in Gaza due to Israel’s bombing campaign.
Other similar reports will surely follow McGreal’s and the combined impact will last years, substantially adding to calls for international legal action against Netanyahu and his government.
This is where Starmer is so vulnerable. Thanks largely to the work of a handful of investigative journalists, especially Declassified UK, we know more than the British government would like about the UK’s close links with Israel – including the multiple roles of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus in aiding Israel and the hundreds of thousands of pounds flowing from the Israeli lobby to Cabinet ministers.
Unless there is a radical change in policy towards Israel now that Starmer is in Downing Street, the assault in Gaza will remain a problem for Labour well into the future. Add to this the wider view that Labour is moving markedly to the right and the huge parliamentary majority may not be as stabilising as it first seemed.
Regarding devastation of Gaza as political problem In UK: A major reason there being such a low cost for politicians In Europe for both their Ukraine policy and policies regarding Israel is the public made complicit, at least psychologically speaking. I’ve seen my fellow Finns blurt out stupidest comments ever imaginable, not because people were inherently immoral, but because they were ill-informed to a point of psychological abuse. I’m not sure about technical term, but it is demonstratively hard for an individual admit a self-reinforced error, so it has become a shared sin everyone is concealing with their behaviour, something like an alcoholic parent for the whole community. The best I’ve noticed -and I do think there’s been a change of tone among many of my countrymen- is thus falling silent. Majority is in denial and the worst culprits are getting away with it, because people rather deny a realization than admit being tools that they’ve pretty much been all along. And if you go tell them, they get angry. That’s our species In all its glory.
The remarkable fact of the UK election – something so obvious that even the Guardian couldn’t ignore it – is that Labour won a gigantic landslide in seats while barely shifting their vote in absolute or relative numbers. In fact, nearly all the increase in votes for Labour came in Scotland, thanks to the ineptness of the SNP.
The reason for this is very simply and straightforward – Reform split the right wing vote, losing the Tories seat after seat all over England allowing Labour and LibDem victories in droves as non-right wing voters went for whoever would stop them. Labour rarely faced any organised competition from the left to centre – where they did, either from a strong local party (LibDem; Green or Plaid Cymru) or from a strong independent, they often suffered as badly as the Tories. With hindsight, the decision of the Tories to go to the country so early was an enormous boon to Labour, as it made it almost impossible for anti Labour groups to organise a meaningful opposition. Too often the anti-Labour vote was itself split. In some cases, clearly by Labour itself running shadow candidates.
I doubt they’ll be turning their brains to it immediately, but it must have crossed the minds of at least some within Labour that if they are not careful, the same thing could happen in reverse in the next election, especially if some form of united Tory/Reform party emerges from the ashes (my guess is that it would be in the form of an effective right wing nationalist take over of the Tory Party.
The big problem for opponents of Starmer, is that the non-Labour left is hopelessly ideologically split. There are old style social democrats who hate the neoliberal/neocon turn, Greens, local nationalists (such as Plaid Cymru), and various orthodox leftist groups, not to mention locally based overtly muslim political groupings, who up to now have been content to be entryists into whichever party looked my convenient. Given the nature of the UK political system, its very hard to see any one coherent alternative party of the left being able to seriously challenge.
I’m not in the UK so I can’t comment, but I seriously doubt that there is sufficient interest in Gaza among the electorate as a whole to make it toxic for Starmer to do what he or his handlers wants. The passion on Gaza is primarily among young activists and the various ethnic minorities who are important, but not vital, to Labour.
But its also the reality that any opposition to Starmer inside or outside Labour must find something to rally around. The big tent of Toryism broke up because a minority on the libertarian/nationalist right found an issue to rally around – Brexit. Many didn’t even particularly agree with it, but it was a convenient lever to open up the fissures that always exist within big tent political groupings. Anti-Starmer forces need to find an issue to rally around, and Gaza could be it (although I suspect that Gaza is just too far away from most peoples experience to do that). I assume that the advisors around Starmer are smart enough to see the need to prevent any such catalyst developing, but these things have a habit of taking a life of their own.
But the reality is that unless something unexpected happens, the UK is stuck with Starmer for the next half decade – probably more, given how long it will take for a real opposition to organise. Something may arise that gives opponents the chance to unite on the ground. But I really think its too early yet to be sure what that will be.
yes, that’s a solid take. Labour ran shadow candidates notably in Blackburn against Craig Murray (Adnan Hussein, the “independent”, actually won) and perhaps even two in Stratford & Bow against Halina Khan. I don’t know why voters turned against Galloway, though.
I agree that the public is largely apathetic to Gaza. They mostly just wanted the Tories out, even if they were only subbed by their B team.
Starmer will be brought down by living conditions that continue to worsen, maybe even the war in Ukraine if it keeps on escalating. At some point, the media will turn on him when public opinion has sufficiently shifted.
Also worth noting, in the 2019 GE, the media did a good job of scaremongering about a Corbyn government that more people who otherwise would have stayed home or voted Lib Dem voted Tory. This election, the Labour vote decreased but the Tory vote collapsed, as more people became apathetic due to the lack of choice or simply out of a lack of fear of a Starmer government.
Oh, it’s Rogers again. More wishful thinking.
Look, UK elections are not won, or for the most part even influenced, by foreign policy issues, and there is no reason to suppose that Gaza had any measurable impact on the results on July 4. (PK has set out what happened very well.) There was a lot of unhappiness and opposition to what was going on there, and a degree of organisation in Muslim communities. But most people in Britain (unlike political activists) are well aware that even quite dramatic shifts in public opinion don’t impact the conduct of foreign policy except in extraordinary circumstances, largely because there are so many moving parts, and domestic public opinion is only a smallish one of them. Moreover, compared to the damage that a major change in UK policy on Gaza would do to the relationships with other western states, it’s not obvious that the transitory applause of political activists is actually worth having.
I suspect there will be a change in policy at some point, but it will be a result of pressure from outside, not inside.